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Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

Wow, Mexico is fucked. Well, more than usual that is as they're not taking any measures against CORVID like at all. They just had a big 110,000+ people concert in the capital when there were already confirmed cases there.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics...hteningly-unprepared-for-the-coronavirus.html

Also those hoarding TP may have the last laugh after all? Turns out that "Diarrhea and other digestive symptoms are the main complaint in nearly half of coronavirus patients". Which is honestly both pretty awful and makes me want to chuckle at the same time.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/coronavirus-digestive-symptoms-diarrhea-almost-half-of-patients/#
 
The coronavirus has definitely revealed that minimum-wage service workers are absolutely instrumental for society to function… all the fancy business meetings can be cancelled, the NBA can be cancelled, public schools and colleges can be cancelled, government meetings can be cancelled, but the checkout line at the grocery store can't be cancelled. Sadly society sucks and has a bad memory so it won't lead to increased wages or respect for us grunts in retail.
 
Train Dodger said:
Secondly, I have all my fucking research right here, citing all my goddamn sources:
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This is, well, decent... but missing some important on-the-ground info.

Notably, that bit where you say that N95 masks are inadequate?

Yeah, maybe, but even those are in short supply. Health workers are having to make do with even less. Some are going so far as to make makeshift face-shields in the (possibly futile) hope that they'll help.

I'd say more, but, well, Rule 8.

That said, the probable consequences of this are fucking depressing.

Also, the consequences of the lack of ventilators and ventilator masks are following a similar pattern. We just don't have enough of either.

Again, this is fucking depressing stuff.

Let me tell you a bit of a personal story. I never met my maternal grandfather. He died of heart disease before I was born. He also knew it was likely to happen.

Mom hasn't told me a lot of details, and anyone familiar with my relationship with her will have a good idea as to why I'm not asking for more. Besides, she probably doesn't know. It doesn't matter. I'm going to fill in some of those gaps with educated speculation so you can see my point.

When my grandfather was a kid, he came down with something. Mom never told me what. He suffered damage to his heart as a result.

Given his age, and the illnesses going around at the time, the most likely candidates for this are all respiratory in nature. NONE are as fucking nasty as COVID-19. If this was the case, the most likely route to heart damage would be hypoxia -- although sepsis is also a possible route.

COVID-19 can cause both.

He survived whatever the illness was, but, as noted, suffered damage to his heart. He had to carefully watch his diet for the rest of his life, and was never able to be terribly physically active. Most "outdoor" jobs would have been beyond him.

He went on to be a successful defense attorney despite this, but things got worse as he got older. Around when Mom was in college, his heart finally gave out on him. His wife -- my maternal grandmother -- never got over the loss.

Now imagine this sort of shit, spread all over the population. Imagine one out of five people dealing with that sort of thing.

Realistic? Maybe. Putting people on ventilators when they need them can help a good bit. But, going by the CDC, roughly 12% of cases so far have required hospitalization. In the 20-44 year age range, that's an estimate of 14.3% to 20.8%, with the range being due to incomplete data. The numbers are higher for older groups.

If the hospitals get overloaded, there won't be beds for those people. That means that they won't get needed treatment -- and even if they do survive, there's a good chance they'll wind up like my grandfather... and no, heart damage isn't the only possible consequence (lung damage is more likely, and there have been reports of brain damage). We'll also see the fatality numbers go up.

The reports out of Italy are fucking depressing, and could easily be duplicated here.

Oh, and Train Dodger? The virology and cell biology texts aren't likely to help you much at this point... depending on just what you're looking into or want to learn. Internal medicine and/or epidemiology may be more your speed... although, again, it depends.

Edit: As an addendum, I forgot to look at some other data when writing this. The British Medical Journal's best practice page on COVID-19 estimates cardiac injury in 7-13% of patients. Of course, liver injury is estimated at 14-53%. So yeay?
 
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Then, and from where I live, this will eventually kill me and my family, either by the virus itself or because of starvation at some point since we can't survive being quarantined for months, in a country where incomes were scarce to begin with, public services like water and electricity have long been highly flawed and prone to go off at the drop of a hat, telework isn't an option and you must earn a living in a regular basis if you want to keep eating at all.

It's only a matter of when, and all ways are horrible ways to go.

I see.

...

I fucking can't cope with this. I can't.
 
While I think some of the panic is overblown, there is also a serious problem here in the US with downplaying how much of a threat it is. Calling it "just the flu" is the equivalent of being that one dumbass in a zombie horror flick who gets bit then hides it from the rest of the group.
 
I have to say its quite nice to have everyone apologizing to me for not listening to me when I warned them and calling me crazy for stocking up on supplies.

Of course it would be nicer if my mother didn't most likely have it and wasn't coughing around me. She can't get tested because she doesn't have shortness of breath nor did she travel even though there's already over two dozen cases in the area where I live with several of those people not knowing how they were exposed.
 
If you traveled or not doesn't matter at this point, the virus is here. Especially near air ports.

-edit-

It's also very hard to find toilet paper where I live so even if I wanted to stock up on it, people already got to it first.
 
OverReactionGuy said:
It's also very hard to find toilet paper where I live so even if I wanted to stock up on it, people already got to it first.
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People managed just fine without toilet paper for a very long time.

MasterOfDragonsGod said:
Just hop in the shower after you shit it works fine.
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For the most part, they used washable hand towels (which are better than toilet paper anyway, especially if you're environmentally conscious), but your way works as well.
 
Aleh said:
That is, simply put, one of the best explanations I've seen so far. It leaves out some critical information, but said information is stuff we don't have clear answers for yet, not to mention that much of it is arguably outside the scope of the video anyway.
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Thanks. Been looking up stuff for this so I have a better understanding of the situation bother currently and in the future. I use Kurzgesagt for science stuff usually but this is important.
 
Having trouble getting our product out because all the trucks are booked.
We have to lock up our fucking dust masks at work up now, only one box is allowed out of the supply room at a time, because some chuckle fucks on the other side(two separate buildings) were stealing a bunch from their own supply rooms to sell online. Can only get the masks from Africa now,(China's not exporting anymore) our country is getting 2% of their production, and our work is guaranteed to get a certain amount(for being a staple producer). Other things going missing include hand sanitiser, anti-bacterial hand soap, and toilet paper.
Seriously I'm nor surprised people are stealing stuff at work, it always happens like how someone stole all four of our industrial evaporative coolers.
 
As bad as first world countries have it I strongly suspect that third world countries will have it far worse due to large supply chain issues and transportation that are popping up all over the place. I am of the belief that due to the current business decision of having everything being produced, made, and shipped from other countries rather than at home, a good number of populations will be in trouble when food and medication doesn't meet demand. I'm kind of a pessimist but in my opinion while the disease itself will not meet apocalyptic numbers I think that ratio wise to the world population then and now this whole event will kill more than the Spanish Flu.

I am not certain how helpful it may be for some people but I would strongly suggest learning some undervalued skills that could mean the difference between being another desperate person and someone valued in the community for a service. Some examples being knowing how to repair shoes, at home dentistry, stitching wounds, etc. I know Nike is shutting down their stores where I live and should lock downs and the epidemic go on, for say half a year, shoe repair would suddenly become a very useful trade skill for supplies.
 
Venezuela is probably utterly fucked and this pandemic might finally be execution shot. Iran is doing pretty badly too, I hear. It seems that a lot of people ignored advisement to stay home and instead went out to visit family and relatives on a major holiday.
 
Scary shit, can not say how accurate the numbers are... but just... -_-

https://twitter.com/jeremycyoung/status/1239975682643357696

The Imperial College team plugged infection and death rates from China/Korea/Italy into epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation: what happens if the US does absolutely nothing -- if we treat COVID-19 like the flu, go about our business, and let the virus take its course?

Here's what would happen: 80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself.

It gets worse. People with severe COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number available in the US. Nearly 100% of these patients die.

So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans -- in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die.

How many is 4 million people? It's more Americans than have died all at once from anything, ever. It's the population of Los Angeles. It's 4 times the number of Americans who died in the Civil War...on both sides combined. It's two-thirds as many people as died in the Holocaust.

Americans make up 4.4% of the world's population. If we extrapolate these numbers to the rest of the world (warning: MOE is high here), this gives us 90 million deaths globally from COVID-19, in 3-6 months. 15 Holocausts. 1.5 times as many people as died in all of World War II.

Now, of course countries won't stand by and do nothing. So the Imperial College team ran the numbers again, this time assuming a "mitigation" strategy: all symptomatic cases in the US in isolation. Families of those cases quarantined. All Americans over 70 social distancing.

This mitigation strategy is what you've seen a lot of people talking about when they say we should "flatten the curve": try to slow the spread of the disease to the people most likely to die from it, to avoid overwhelming hospitals.

And it does flatten the curve -- but not nearly enough. The death rate from the disease is cut in half, but it still kills 1.1 million Americans all by itself. The peak need for ventilators falls by two-thirds, but it still exceeds the number of ventilators in the US by 8 times.

That leaves the actual death toll in the US at right around 2 million deaths. The population of Houston. Two Civil Wars. One-third of the Holocaust. Globally, 45 million people die: 7.5 Holocausts, 3/4 of World War II. That's what happens if we rely on mitigation & common sense.

Finally, the Imperial College team ran the numbers again, assuming a "suppression" strategy: isolate symptomatic cases, quarantine their family members, social distancing for the whole population, all public gatherings/most workplaces shut down, schools and universities close.

Suppression works! The death rate in the US peaks 3 weeks from now at a few thousand deaths, then goes down. We hit but don't exceed the number of available ventilators. The nightmarish death tolls from the rest of the study disappear.

But here's the catch: if we EVER relax suppression before a vaccine is administered to the entire population, COVID-19 comes right back and kills millions of Americans in a few months, the same as before.

After the 1st suppression period ends in July, we could probably lift restrictions for a month, followed by 2 more months of suppression, in a repeating pattern without triggering an outbreak or overwhelming the ventilator supply. Staggering breaks by city could do a bit better.

But we simply cannot EVER allow the virus to spread throughout the entire population in the way other viruses do, because it is just too deadly. If lots of people we know end up getting COVID-19, it means millions of Americans are dying. It simply can't be allowed to happen.

How quickly will a vaccine be here? Last week three separate research teams announced they had developed vaccines. Yesterday, one of them (with FDA approval) injected its vaccine into a live person, without waiting for animal testing. That's an extreme measure, but necessary.

Now, though, they have to monitor the test subject for 14 months to make sure the vaccine is safe. This part can't be rushed: if you're going to inoculate all humans, you have to make absolutely sure the vaccine itself won't kill them. It probably won't, but you have to be sure.

Assuming the vaccine is safe and effective, it will still take several months to produce enough to inoculate the global population. For this reason, the Imperial College team estimated it will be about 18 months until the vaccine is available.

During those 18 months, things are going to be very difficult and very scary. Our economy and society will be disrupted in profound ways. And if suppression actually works, it will feel like we're doing all this for nothing, because infection and death rates will remain low.

It's easy to get people to come together in common sacrifice in the middle of a war. It's very hard to get them to do so in a pandemic that looks invisible precisely because suppression methods are working. But that's exactly what we're going to have to do. /end

A couple of clarifications/corrections. 1) An error on my end: 45 million global deaths would be the most from a pandemic since the Spanish Flu of 1918, not since the Middle Ages. Apologies for the mistake.

2) "The Holocaust" can refer to either the 6 million Jews killed by Hitler (that's how I use it here) or everyone he killed (around 17 million total). 3) WWII lasted 6 years in Europe, but 12 years in Asia, if you treat the invasion of Manchuria as its starting point (most do).
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Do the global deaths calculated in that study take into account the lack of healthcare resources in poorer countries? While some places might be paradoxically spared through not being very interconnected I imagine that a lot of people are going to die due to not having access to hospitals or due to quarantine measures being impossible to implement.

The thought that we will need cyclical periods of quarantine until a vaccine is found in order to be safe paints the partial lifting of the quarantine in Hubei in a depressing light.

For richer countries there is also the homeless population to consider. They will probably be pretty hard hit as they often have the least access to healthcare and they also often have health problems already that an infection could worsen. If they aren't taken care of they could provide a population for the virus to circulate in while the rest of us get to hide at home.

I don't have any hard data on any of this, but it is the stuff that worries me.
 
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henkalv said:
Do the global deaths calculated in that study take into account the lack of healthcare resources in poorer countries? While some places might be paradoxically spared through not being very interconnected I imagine that a lot of people are going to die due to not having access to hospitals or due to quarantine measures being impossible to implement.

The thought that we will need cyclical periods of quarantine until a vaccine is found in order to be safe paints the partial lifting of the quarantine in Hubei in a depressing light.
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They're basing it on the US for the death rates. And extrapolating the world using the US as the 'baseline'.
 
Biigoh said:
Scary shit, can not say how accurate the numbers are... but just... -_-

https://twitter.com/jeremycyoung/status/1239975682643357696
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Did they also model the apparent effectiveness of some anti-malarial drugs in treating Covid? That is, if there's medication that can at least attenuate the disease enough that it stops so many people needing ventilators? Because if so flattening the curve at least long enough so that production of the drug can be ramped up should also massively reduce deaths.
 
It's amazing to look at the some the results this has had on the job market, the other day Coles revealed that the average number of daily job applications went from 800 to 37,000. The friend of a guy at work who got the sack has also volunteered for a coronavirus treatment trial test, paid 6k to go to Queensland, be infected, and then tested on.
 
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